News: December 2005 Archives
By Tian Ning | The Epoch Times
December 27, 2005
Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party
The Epoch Times was the among the first media sources to disclose the true facts about the bloody suppression of Shanwei farmers on December 6, 2006. This incident has shocked the international community. The world has condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for gunning people down. So far the CCP has not punished any government officials for neglect of duties, but has been monitoring the farmers even more closely. All relevant information is being blocked.
The Chinese people will discover the truth no matter how many blockades are put in place. Since this incident, many statements renouncing the CCP have been received by the Global Service Center of Quitting Chinese Communist Party from people near Dongzhou Town and other areas in China. They all state things along the lines of, "This evil party doesn't even care about people's lives; it certainly will disintegrate very soon."
BBC News
December 29, 2005
The authorities in China have dismissed the top editor of the Beijing News, one of the country's most popular and daring newspapers. Editor-in-chief Yang Bin was removed along with two other senior editors.
No official reason was given, but a lawyer who often represents journalists said Communist officials had accused the paper of multiple errors.
The Beijing News has a reputation for forthright reporting and commentary, despite strict control over the press.
It exposed a bloody crackdown ordered by officials against protesting farmers in the northern province of Dingzhou in June, in which six farmers were killed.
Edward Cody, Washington Post |
December 25, 2005
Shanwei, China -- Two weeks after a protest that culminated in gunfire and bloodshed, the rebellious farmers and fishermen of Dongzhou have been reduced to submission. Authorities have sealed off the seaside village and flooded its streets and lanes with police patrols, residents said, and an unknown number of men have been summoned by a knock on the door and hauled away for interrogation.
As a result, the spirit of defiance that pushed several thousand villagers to clash with riot troops and People's Armed Police forces on Dec. 6 has been replaced by fear, foreboding and resentment, according to conversations with a number of residents. Normal life has been suspended inside the community, they said, and outsiders who approached Monday were halted by police at a barrier with a sign that read: "Entry Not Allowed."
"We seldom go outside our houses anymore," said a villager contacted by telephone. "We seldom talk to other villagers. People are afraid to, because the police are patrolling all around the village. We are afraid that if we get together they might arrest us for some reason or another."
Dongzhou, on the southeast edge of Shanwei city about 125 miles northeast of Hong Kong, has come under a wave of repression. Shanwei officials, in their announcements, have focused attention on three men they qualified as "instigators" who they said used "threats and superstition" to arouse their neighbors to rebellion. All three have been in custody since Dec. 9.
The crackdown by officials in Dongzhou was similar to the response by authorities to riots that have erupted with increasing frequency across China over the past two years, according to accounts by witnesses and participants.
A Chinese democracy activist has reportedly been jailed for 12 years for helping to organise anti-Japanese protests in China earlier this year.
The wife of Xu Wanping said he had been found guilty of incitement to subvert state power at a closed hearing.
Mr Xu, 44, was among a number of activists known to have been arrested as a result of the protests in April.
Demonstrators opposed Japan's approval of textbooks which they said glossed over wartime atrocities it committed.
Mr Xu was accused of helping to organise a signature campaign against the school history books.
Original source: BBC News
By HOWARD W. FRENCH - The New York Times
SHANGHAI, Dec. 16 - Ten days ago, the sleepy fishing village of Dongzhou was the scene of a deadly face-off, with protesters hurling homemade bombs and the police gunning them down in the streets.
Now, a stilted calm prevails, a cover-up so carefully planned that the small town looks like a relic from the Cultural Revolution, as if the government had decided to re-educate the entire population. Banners hang everywhere, with slogans in big red characters proclaiming things like, "Stability is paramount" and "Don't trust instigators."
Many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec. 6, which residents say ended in the deaths of 20 or more people, but one thing is certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent witnesses' accounts of what happened from emerging.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH - The New York Times
SHANGHAI, Dec. 13 - One week after the police violently suppressed a demonstration against the construction of a power plant in China, leaving as many as 20 people dead, an overwhelming majority of the Chinese public still knows nothing of the event.
In the wake of the biggest use of armed force against civilians since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Chinese officials have used a variety of techniques - from barring reports in most newspapers outside the immediate region to banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google - to prevent news of the deaths from spreading.
Beijing's handling of news about the incident, which was widely reported internationally, provides a revealing picture of the government's ambitions to control the flow of information to its citizens, and of the increasingly sophisticated techniques - a combination of old-fashioned authoritarian methods and the latest Internet technologies - that it uses to keep people in the dark.
The government's first response was to impose a news blackout, apparently banning all Chinese news media from reporting the Dec. 6 confrontation. It was not until Saturday, four days later, with foreign news reports proliferating, that the official New China News Agency released the first Chinese account.
from the BBC News
The authorities in China have arrested a police commander who ordered officers to open fire during a disturbance, killing protesters, media reports say.
The arrest comes after officials broke several days' silence to say that three villagers were shot dead in the protest, in Guangdong province.
Local residents have alleged that up to 20 people were killed.
If this is true, this could be China's deadliest use of force against protesters since Tiananmen Square.
A special investigation into the incident has been launched.
Protests against corruption, pollution and land seizures have become increasingly common in rural China.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH - The New York Times
SHANGHAI, Dec. 9 - Residents of a fishing village near Hong Kong said Friday that as many as 20 people were killed by the paramilitary police this week, in an unusually violent clash that marked an escalation in the widespread social protests roiling the Chinese countryside. Villagers said as many as 50 other residents remained unaccounted for since the shootings on Tuesday.
It was the largest known use of force by security personnel against citizens since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989. That death toll is still unknown, but is estimated to have been in the hundreds.
The violence near Hong Kong began after dark on Tuesday evening in the town of Dongzhou, when the police opened fire on crowds to put down a demonstration over plans for a power plant. Terrified residents said their hamlet has been occupied since then by thousands of security officers, who have blocked off all access roads and were arresting residents who have tried to leave the area in the wake of the heavily armed assault.
"From about 7 p.m. the police started firing tear gas into the crowd, but this failed to scare people," said a resident who gave his name only as Li and claimed to have been at the scene, where, he said, a relative had been killed.
"Later, we heard more than 10 explosions, and thought they were just detonators, so nobody was scared," Li said. "At about 8 p.m. they started using guns, shooting bullets into the ground, but not really targeting anybody. Finally, at about 10 p.m. they started killing people."
By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer
Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting demonstrators and searched for the protest organizers, villagers said Friday.
Although security forces often use tear gas and truncheons to disperse demonstrators, it is extremely rare for them to fire into a crowd — as they did in putting down pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 near Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed.
During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.
Police started firing into the crowd and killed several people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said Friday. The death toll ranged from two to 10, they said, and many remained missing.
State media have not mentioned the incident and both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment. This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information without permission from the central government.
By JOSEPH KAHN - The New York Times
BEIJING, Dec. 6 - China on Tuesday contested the conclusions of a United Nations envoy and denied that torture was widespread in the country, asking the envoy to revise his views before making a final report on his two-week visit.
Manfred Nowak, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, presented an initial summary of his investigation last week, accusing the Chinese police, prison guards and other judicial officials of relying on torture to extract confessions and eliminate "deviant behavior." He also said Chinese security forces had hampered his investigation by following him and intimidating people whom he intended to interview.
"China cannot accept the so-called conclusion that torture is widespread," the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said at a news conference, adding that torture was banned in China.
"The rapporteur was only in China for two short weeks and went to three cities, after which he made the judgment that torture was widespread." Mr. Qin said. "This lacks an objective foundation and does not accord with reality."
He also denied that security forces had hindered Mr. Nowak's investigation, though several people who spoke with or sought to reach Mr. Nowak during his stay said separately in interviews that they had been harassed or physically prevented from contacting him.
from Radio Free Asia
HONG KONG — At least two villagers in China’s southern province of Guangdong have died after police fired on a crowd protesting the construction of a wind power plant, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.
Witnesses and Dongzhou Hospital authorities near the port city of Shanwei told RFA’s Mandarin service that by 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, villagers Jiang Hu and Jiang Guanji had died in the local hospital while a third, identified as Tang Daxiang, was receiving emergency treatment.
“At least four villagers have died,” another villager said at approximately 11:30 p.m. “There is a dead body on the street yet to be retrieved. Many are wounded by gunshots. I don’t know what kind of guns. I just know they were using real bullets on us. No policemen were wounded.”
“The hospital has become a virtual funeral hall with family members of the dead crying,”one villager told reporter Ding Xiao.
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